On generating combilex pronunciations via morphological analysis

Combilex is a high quality lexicon that has been developed specifically for speech technology purposes and recently released by CSTR. Combilex benefits from many advanced features. This paper explores one of these: the ability to generate fully-specified transcriptions for morphologically derived words automatically. This functionality was originally implemented to encode the pronunciations of derived words in terms of their constituent morphemes, thus accelerating lexicon development and ensuring a high level of consistency. In this paper, we propose this method of modelling pronunciations can be exploited further by combining it with a morphological parser, thus yielding a method to generate full transcriptions for unknown derived words. Not only could this accelerate adding new derived words to Combilex, but it could also serve as an alternative to conventional letter-to-sound rules. This paper presents preliminary work indicating this is a promising direction.